Jaguar Supercomputer Accepted, Cray Buys More Notes

January 5, 2009 by

Cray has announced that the one petaflop Jaguar supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Lab officially passed its acceptance tests at the end of 2008. For those wondering, large HPC procurements often require the vendor to meet a set of contracted performance and reliability goals in order to truly write a check for the hardware and software. The vendor organization can seldom revenue the project until final acceptance is complete. This means that the Jaguar supercomputer project generated on the order of $100 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2008.

We are extremely pleased to announce the acceptance of ‘Jaguar,’ the first system in the world to achieve sustained petaflops performance on a real-world application,” said Cray CEO, Peter Ungaro. “Thanks to the hard work and dedication of many people across Oak Ridge, the U.S. Department of Energy and Cray, the scientific community now has access to one of the most powerful computing systems in the world, leveraging unique Cray technology to open new possibilities for discovery and major scientific breakthroughs.”

Cray also found that their declining common stock price in the fourth quarter forced their market capitalization sat below the “net assets” of the company. This resulted in a non-cash write-down of the November 30th Goodwill balance of roughly ~55.4 million. On December 24th, the company also repurchased $6million in principal amount of its 3.0% Convertible Senior Subordinated Notes due 2024. They began the fourth quarter with $80million in Notes and ended it with $27.727million.

All in all, Cray’s been on a good run as of late. For more info, read the full article here.

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